Asfura wins Honduras presidential election with Trump endorsement
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Nasry Asfura won the 2025 Honduran presidential election, ensuring the victory of the center-right Honduran National Party (PNH) and changing the political landscape of Central America.
The 40.3% to 39.5% result in Asfura’s favor over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla came after the vote counting process was affected for days by technical glitches and allegations of vote rigging by other candidates. Rixi Moncada, candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, came in third by a wide margin.
The results of the race were so tight and the ballot processing system so chaotic that about 15% of hundreds of thousands of ballots had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.
Despite disagreements over the very small difference in votes, two electoral council members and one MP certified the results. The video announcing the winner did not include third council member Marlon Ocha.
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Tito Asfura defeats Salvador Nasralla and Rixi Moncada after repeated endorsements from President Trump (AP)
“Honduras: I’m ready to govern. I won’t let you down,” Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.
However, the head of the Honduran Congress rejected the results and called them an “electoral coup”.
“This is completely illegal,” Congress President Luis Redondo of the LIBRE party said in X. “It’s worth nothing.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on X, saying the United States “looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.”
Initially, preliminary results on Monday showed Asfura, 67, winning 41 percent of the vote, putting him slightly ahead of Nasralla, 72, who received about 39 percent of the vote.
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President Donald Trump gestures to supporters at an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds on February 24, 2024. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the website established to share vote counts with the public experienced technical problems and crashed. Associated Press.
With the candidates only 515 votes apart, a virtual tie and site crash prompted President Trump to post on Truth Social.
“Honduras appears to be trying to change the results of the Presidential Election,” he wrote. “If they do this, we will pay the price in hell!”
On Thursday, Asfura received 40.05% of the vote, nearly 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who received 39.75%. Reuters, the latter later called for an investigation.
Writing on social media, Nasralla said, “I clearly condemn that at 3.24 in the morning today the screen went dark and an algorithm similar to the one used in 2013 changed the data,” adding that 1,081,000 votes for his party were transferred to Asfura, while 1,073,000 votes for the Asfura National Party were attributed to him.
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LIBRE candidate Rixi Moncada is a well-known lawyer, financier and former Minister of National Defense. (RELATED PRESS)
Asfura, nicknamed “Tito,” is a former mayor of Tegucigalpa and entered the race with a reputation for leadership and a focus on infrastructure, public order and efficiency.
His win ended a polarized campaign season; One of the defining moments of the contest was Asfura’s endorsement by Trump.
“If he [Asfura] “If it doesn’t win, the United States will not throw good money at bad,” Trump wrote on the Truth Social platform on November 28.
Before voting began on Nov. 29, Trump said he would also pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once led the same party as Asfura. Herandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence for aiding drug traffickers.
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Nasralla is a high-profile television personality turned politician. (RELATED PRESS)
In the end, the election saw the defeat of Honduras’ centrist former Vice President Nasralla and left-wing Ramona, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro.
A prominent lawyer, financier, and former minister of National Defense, he focused on institutional reform and social equity.
Nasralla, a high-profile television personality-turned-politician, mobilized a base but fell short of turning his popularity into a winning coalition.
He was focusing on cleaning up corruption in Honduras. The Honduran presidential race has also been affected by accusations of fraud.
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In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans also voted for a new Congress and hundreds of local positions.
Reuters contributed to this report.
